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Finally something that explicitly ties AI into the culture war: Why I HATE A.I. Art - by Vaush
I endorse pretty much all of the points he makes in this video. I do recommend watching the whole thing all the way through, if you have time.
I went into this curious to see exactly what types of arguments he would make, as I've been interested in the relationship between AI progress and the left/right divide. His arguments fall into roughly two groups.
First is the "material impact" arguments - that this will be bad for artists, that you're using their copyrighted work without their permission, that it's not fair to have a machine steal someone's personal style that they worked for years to develop, etc. I certainly feel the force of these arguments, but it's also easy for AI advocates to dismiss them with a simple "cry about it". Jobs getting displaced by technology is nothing new. We can't expect society to defend artists' jobs forever, if they are indeed capable of being easily automated. Critics of AI art need to provide more substantial arguments about why AI art is bad in itself, rather than simply pointing out that it's bad for artists' incomes. Which Vaush does make an attempt at.
The second group of arguments could perhaps be called "deontological arguments" as they go beyond the first-person experiential states of producers and consumers of AI art, and the direct material harm or benefit caused by AI. The main concern here is that we're headed for a future where all media and all human interaction is generated by AI simulations, which would be a hellish dystopia. We don't want things to just feel good - we want to know that there's another conscious entity on the other end of the line.
It's interesting to me how strongly attuned Vaush is to the "spiritual" dimension of this issue, which I would not have expected from an avowed leftist. It's clearly something that bothers him on an emotional level. He goes so far as to say:
and, what was the real money shot for me:
Now, on the one hand, "leftism" and "Marxism" are absolutely massive intellectual traditions with a lot of nuance and disagreement, and I certainly don't expect all leftists to hold the same views on everything. On the other hand, I really do think that what we're seeing now with AI content generation is a natural consequence of the leftist impulse, which has always been focused on the ceaseless improvement and elevation of man in his ascent towards godhood. What do you think "fully automated luxury gay space communism" is supposed to mean? It really does mean fully automated. If everyone is to be a god unto themselves, untrammeled by external constraints, then that also means they have the right to shirk human relationships and form relationships with their AI buddies instead (and also flood the universe with petabytes of AI-generated art). At some point, there seems to be a tension between progress on the one hand and traditional authenticity on the other.
It was especially amusing when he said:
I guess everyone becomes a reactionary at some point - the only thing that differs is how far you have to push them.
It won't neatly map to a left/right divide, not the least because there's no single such divide. So while I can empathize with feelings of "hey, you are a leftist/rightist, this isn't what you should think about this issue!", ultimately this is not very interesting, other than showing that a binary categorization is insufficient.
The split here is between pro-tech optimists, believers in quantification, that problems of society are mainly technical etc. vs people who miss the "soul" of things.
Some leftist utopias are fully automated large scale standardized productions, but others are about local communities in opposition to capitalist exploitation (of environment and communities). The left is supposed to like disruption and new ways of solving things, except if it comes from capitalist exploitation. There's also a distinction between classical left and woke capital which is nowadays often confused with the left.
Some of the right is pro business and pro capitalist, pro-large scale production, but other parts are more religious and miss the soul of things, the traditions, like the fruit of skilled dignified hard human labour, prefer local things as opposed to multinational business output, out of patriotism and nationalism.
There are some otherwise unnatural pseudo-alliances around woke topics that may connect trads with libertarian transhumanists but things like the AI issue may be a point of collision.
My own attitude is similar to eg furniture. Sure, a skilled carpenter can make a fabulous bed frame with soul and all, and it's beautiful hard work that puts bread on the table from the sweat of the brow etc. But it's expensive and so IKEA has its place too.
Most of the pictures, illustrations and clip arts, stock images, filler crap don't need novel artistic expression. It's like lamenting the emergence of word processor software and how it displaces the fine artists that typographers and editors are, now that people can typeset their own docs. And I'm sure people said as much back in the 80s. It's the same but for drawing.
Pandemics and vaccines weren’t supposed to be a left/right issue either, but, we saw how that turned out.
For sure and that's a good example. On the one hand Trust The Science, on the other hand science is a fake-objective old/dead white cishet male-biased colonial-legacy Western Eurocentric project that needs to be dismantled in favor of other ways of knowing like indigenous lived experience.
Similarly with big tech / big corporations. They are bd because white libertarian tech bros but also good in the sense that eg women should see it as their life goal to build a career in them.
It all depends on who feels like that they are inside and who feel outside. Academic leftists will defend the status/prestige of academic knowledge production if it's controlled by them. Similarly if big tech supports ideologically/politically motivated "fact checking", then big tech is good.
It's often not about aesthetics and principles of whether rational quantification and cold calculation and large scale factories are good or small-scale, holistic, emotionally-nice, human-level handmade stuff is good, just who feels in control, in terms of identity politics groups.
There are plenty of conservatives and far right people who don't want to "play God", do genetic engineering, AI, etc.
This really is an issue where you at least need the Red/Blue/Gray three-way distinction.
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